Thomas Hart Benton: an American Original. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 22, 1989 by Selden Rodman

WHEN, IN THE always political 1930s, I visited Thomas Hart Benton in Martha's Vineyard, we seldom talked about politics. Instead, we talked about art-incessantly. It seemed to me that Tom had everything an artist could want: a beautiful, loving wife, and a perky son; enough fame to make a very good living (Time had done a cover story in December of 1934), but not enough to unbalance him; good friends with whom to exchange bawdy stories, but who were not overly impressed with his illustrious background and enormous talent. He organized a band, himself on harmonica playing Bach or "Buffalo Gals," backed up mainly by his pupils; pupils such as the Pollock brothers, Charles and Jackson. He loved to laugh, especially at himself, although he would bristle if he was laughed at: his diminutive (five foot three) stature, his notorious combativeness, or his paintings.

The painting was always a problem. Could it be taken seriously when so many people liked it, and the "wrong" critics praised it? I could remind him, as I did, that great artists such as Raphael, Titian, and Rubens were popular in their lifetimes without making waves, but Tom knew, and I knew he knew, that I admired the wave-makers more-Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Goyaand I suspect he did too.

On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his birth, marked by the publication of Henry Adams's major biography, the airing of a PBS documentary, and the opening of a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York, it would seem appropriate to recall the man and his career.

Benton was a political animal almost from birth. It could hardly have been otherwise. His father was a Missouri congressman for thirty years, and his great-uncle was the senator who nearly killed Andrew Jackson in a duel, and was described by his biographer, Theodore Roosevelt, as having "the tenacity of a snapping turtle." It is hardly surprising that Tom's father, who was a bull on the hustings, encouraged his son early on to use his fists.

At home, his father was almost tongue-tied by his wife's social graces and sex-shy beauty (in Washington they were known a "Beauty and the Beast"), and she was permitted to encourage Tom's artistic ambitions. She treasured the remarkable drawings her son was making by the age of six, and protected him from the prevalent notion that an artist was a sissy. She need not have bothered; Tom was quite capable of protecting himself

Back home in Missouri, he sharpened his skills as cartoonist for the local paper. He drank in the local saloon, where he was accepted, as he said later, in as short a time as it took to knock an art critic to the floor. He attended the Chicago Art Institute, where he drew the attention of his teachers, both their artistic praise, which he accepted, and their homosexual advances, which he repelled. He began to create the cartoonlike art, aggressively masculine, that, in mural after mural, he would paint until the end of his life.

But do not dismiss Benton as a regionalist booster of Americanism. Look at the watercolors and oils he painted in Paris (1908-10), particularly The Chestnut Tree, which would hold its own in any exhibit of Pissarro or Seurat, or his later painting of Central Park (beautifully reproduced in this book), which stands up with the best of Winslow Homer. His portraits from the same period rival Eakins and Wyeth, and even Clement Greenberg and Hilton Kramer, Abstract Expressionism's high priests, stood in awe of these pictures.

His time in Paris was the unhappiest of his career. He was in despair over his work, lacking an audience, and temporarily bereft of the knack for making art a performance. He was unhappy with his mistress but humiliated when his mother arrived, paid her off for $300, and bundled him back to Missouri. It was fortunate for him that she did, though, for back home he rediscovered his talent, and then in New York he found his medium. He worked on movie sets and learned how to paint "big." He made friends with Lewis Mumford and Thomas Craven at The Dial and became the enemy of Stuart Davis, and he learned the skills of debate (he still considered himself a Marxist) that would later serve him against more formidable adversaries. But marrying the beautiful, indomitably spirited Italian immigrant Rita Piacenza, in defiance of his parents' outrage-that was his greatest exploit. It was a union that would sustain him for the rest of his life.

The story of their marriage is the least satisfactory part of this bookperhaps inevitably, since Rita wrote no letters, and Tom's (at least those I have) deal only with political and aesthetic matters. She never wavered in her support of him, even when he disappeared without notice on sketching trips, one of which lasted a month, during which time she was broke and stranded at the Vineyard with their son. She complained only once. "He's the worst husband and worst father," she told a local journalist. "No American woman could have been married to Tom. You have to leave him alone, and let him come and go as he pleases." Tom's only recorded comment"The bonds of marriage do not lie very heavily on my back." Many people wondered why Rita put up with "My husband," she replied, "is a genius." In his 1922 Self-Portrait with Rita-the cover illustration of this book-Benton presents himself at the ocean, stripped to the waist, arrogantly handsome and muscular, towering over landscape, bathers, and Rita like a god.